Plays & Theater in Greater Boston
Now playing · Fri Sep 18 – Sun Oct 18
Summer 1947. Joe Keller is a self-made manufacturer and a pillar of his neighbourhood, and his younger son Larry has been missing since the war. When the older son announces he means to marry Larry's sweetheart, buried truths surface. Miller took the plot from a real wartime case.
Wed Oct 7 · 6pm
A reading of Fatherland, a play drawn verbatim from court transcripts, case evidence and public statements, about the 18-year-old who turned his father in to the FBI over his role in the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Billy Bollbach ’27 directs Boston College students, alumni and staff; Kristin Lunz Trujillo, assistant professor of political science at BC, leads a talkback afterward.
Wed Sep 30 – Sat Oct 10
An immersive show from the ThotBot Storyworld: you attend a clandestine "Remediation session" run by OMEGA, a resistance cell fighting the regime known as The ULTRA, and learn to glitch the ThotBot brain implant everyone wears in its 1990s post-apocalyptic dystopia. One of a podcast-linked series, each part standing alone, with a talk, video and live music.
Sat Oct 10 · 7:30pm
Kyreé Miller’s live storytelling show recounts five open-heart surgeries, two LVADs and, eventually, a heart transplant, and what came after: reclaiming his body, finding his voice and learning to advocate for himself as a patient. Part performance and part audience conversation, the evening includes a Q&A and time to meet afterward. Miller presents it with his company, Five Heartbeats Productions.
Thu Sep 10 – Sun Oct 11
The Jasper family has been a pillar of Black American political life for decades, until the youngest son comes home with an unexpected dinner guest and the version of itself the family has curated begins to fracture. Branden Jacobs-Jenkins won the 2025 Pulitzer for it. The Washington Post called it "a feast of jaw-dropping tea".
Thu Sep 10 – Sun Oct 11
Paula Plum plays Eleanor Roosevelt alone on stage, revisiting her marriage to Franklin, her activism, and her part in drafting the modern language of human rights. Mark St. Germain wrote it and Bryn Boice directs. The Wall Street Journal called the production "a great show, period".
Sat Sep 26 – Sun Oct 11
Two Euripides plays, Iphigenia at Aulis and Iphigenia in Tauris, woven into a single telling. The gods demand that Agamemnon sacrifice his daughter before his thousand ships can sail for Troy, and the choice sets the rest of his family's fate running. Staged outdoors.
Fri Sep 25 – Sun Oct 11
An interactive whodunit set in a hairdressing salon: the audience questions the suspects and votes on the murderer, so the ending changes from night to night. Paul Portner's play ran for decades in the basement of the Charles Playhouse, and is one of the longest-running non-musicals ever staged in America.
Fri Oct 9 – Sun Oct 11
A three-night multidisciplinary showcase by Boston artists responding to AI — satirical comedy, music, dance and visual art in one bill. The organisers frame it around how artists in particular are experiencing the cultural shifts the technology has set off.
Fri Oct 2 – Sun Oct 11
A writer of gruesome children's stories is interrogated by police in a totalitarian state after local children begin dying in the ways his stories describe. Martin McDonagh's play puts storytelling itself on trial. Corey Cadigan directs, with a puppet built for the title figure.
Thu Oct 8 – Sun Oct 11
Five drama students drink through the night after a first-year is cast as Lady Macbeth over the senior who expected the part, and the evening turns. Sophie McIntosh's play had its off-Broadway premiere in 2022. The Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club performs it with an undergraduate cast.
Sun Oct 11 – Mon Oct 12
A wooden marionette show about cute little gliding possums who go on sweet and simple adventures! Recommended for ages 4 - 8. Marionettes in a table-top toy theater, with miniature scenery.
$18.50 general / $14.50 members, plus $3 fee; $3 Card to Culture
Tue Oct 6 – Wed Oct 14
Scenes and monologues staged in four different rooms of the Central Library's McKim building, with the audience moving between them and each room chosen to suit what is performed in it. Commonwealth Shakespeare makes the production with the Boston Public Library Fund, and admission is free.
Wed Oct 14 · 7:30pm
The Moth StorySLAM is an open-mic storytelling competition in which names are drawn from a hat and each storyteller has five minutes, without notes, to tell a true story on the night’s theme, scored by teams of judges from the audience. The theme is enchantment: an “abracadabra” in a life that “rebuffs logical explanation,” whether great beauty or wild coincidence. WBUR is The Moth’s media partner.
$17
Fri Sep 25 – Sat Oct 17
Johnny "Honeycomb" James comes home famous, changed and impossible to explain. The voice is real; so are the rumours about how he got it. York Walker's gospel-inflected Southern thriller is set in a town that remembers everything, where a good myth might as well be the truth.
Fri Oct 2 – Sat Oct 17
At a tenth-anniversary party the deputy mayor of New York has shot himself in the earlobe and disappeared, his wife is missing, and the arriving guests decide to cover it up before anyone can ask. Neil Simon's farce runs on the escalating lie rather than on one-liners.
Wed Oct 14 – Sat Oct 17
The O'Mallery family gathers in a park to stage an intervention for their sister Barbara, and Robert O'Hara springs a structural trick at the interval that turns the evening into an argument about who gets to tell whose story. Emerson Stage is the college's student-led production company.
Thu Oct 15 – Sun Oct 18
Iago persuades a general who trusts him that his wife is unfaithful, then narrates the destruction to the audience as he arranges it. Shakespeare wrote the play around 1603, working from a novella by Giraldi Cinthio, and the Harvard-Radcliffe Dramatic Club performs it with an undergraduate cast.
Fri Oct 2 – Sun Oct 18
Euripides gives Medea the argument as well as the knife: abandoned by Jason for a royal marriage, she reasons her way to the murder of their children. Marblehead Little Theatre uses Diane Arnson Svarlien's verse translation. Euripides staged the play at the City Dionysia in 431 BC, where it placed third.
Sat Oct 17 – Sun Oct 18
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's rewriting of the fifteenth-century morality play Everyman, in which the actor who plays Everybody is drawn by lottery at each performance and the rest of the cast reshuffles into whatever parts are left. Death comes for Everybody, who then tries to persuade Friendship, Kinship and the others to come along. It was a Pulitzer finalist in 2018.
Sat Oct 17 – Sun Oct 18 · 7:30pm/2pm
Sat Oct 17 · 7:30pm / Sun Oct 18 · 2pm
Boston University's School of Theatre presents a piece of spoken text, voice and movement coordinated by Yo-El Cassell, with images drawn from Seeing Jazz, the Smithsonian anthology. In an abandoned dance hall and jazz club, spirits of the afterlife reconvene to replay vignettes and memories of how their lives moved them, and of how jazz's rhythm, improvisation and call and response ran through those lives.
Oct 15–16/18–19 · 6:30pm
Thu Oct 15 / Fri Oct 16 / Sun Oct 18 / Mon Oct 19 · 6:30pm
A costumed Nathaniel Hawthorne, billed as Salem's master storyteller, performs his own most frightening tales alongside the work of Edgar Allan Poe. The programme includes The House of the Seven Gables, Young Goodman Brown, The Cask of Amontillado, Annabel Lee and The Raven. It is aimed at families with brave children ten and up, and is held in the Visitor Center auditorium, without access to the Mansion.
$50
Wed Oct 14 – Thu Oct 22
Fabiola Decius’s dramedy pairs Danny, a gregarious student athlete on academic probation, with True, the valedictorian-to-be tutoring him, whose overachieving masks deep uncertainty, and asks whether an authentic friendship can grow from a transactional start. The Lyric bills it as a nod to classic teen movies of the late 90s and early 00s. Alexandra Smith directs Matthew Beagan, Grace Picone, Jamil Johnson and Liam McCarron.
Thu Oct 22 · 7:30pm
A.R. Gurney’s Love Letters, a Pulitzer Prize finalist for Drama, follows two friends through the letters they exchange for nearly fifty years. Andrew Makepeace Ladd III and Melissa Gardner write from childhood thank-you notes through boarding school, college, marriages and careers, and remain “each other’s truest confidants even as circumstance and timing keep pulling them apart.” Paula Plum and Richard Snee, husband and wife offstage, play the pair.
From $46
Thu Oct 1 – Sat Oct 24
John Godber's four-hander of British club-land — four bouncers on the door of a northern disco who also play every drunk lad, crying girl and DJ of a Friday night — in Bill Doncaster's staging at Suffolk's 185-seat Modern. Godber's most-performed comedy, all sweat and quick doubling.
Fri Oct 16 – Sat Oct 24
Jo Levitt dies in the autumn of 1911 and the family fractures around the loss: an outraged estranged sister, a lover grieving alone, a brother trying to keep the peace, and a nephew pushed into a reckoning he is not ready for. Staged in the Parker Room rather than the Footlight Club's main hall.
Thu Oct 22 – Sat Oct 24
Thu Oct 22 · 8:00pm / Fri Oct 23 · 8:00pm / Sat Oct 24 · 2:00pm & 8:00pm
Cassie Seinuk's new play, directed by Dori Robinson, follows five teenagers in the girls' bathroom of a suburban high school after an “innocent” picture with a favorite teacher becomes the biggest scandal the school has seen. The one person willing to help may be a former best friend turned antagonist, and a teenage Greek chorus of band geeks, cheerleaders, goths, skaters and jocks narrates.
Sat Oct 24 – Sun Oct 25
Four young conservative Catholics gather in a Wyoming back yard after their college mentor's inauguration and argue through the night about faith, the country and each other, while a generator fails somewhere off stage. Will Arbery's play was a 2020 Pulitzer finalist. BU stages it in a studio theatre.
Sat Oct 24 – Sun Oct 25
Classical music, plus lots of gentle humor, bring to life this beautifully illustrated story of seasonal change and a parent-child relationship. Recommended for ages 3 - 8. Toy theater (flat tabletop puppets).
$18.50 general / $14.50 members, plus $3 fee; $3 Card to Culture
Fri Oct 16 – Sun Oct 25
Sarah Ruhl's comedy is about a descendant of Rebecca Nurse, hanged in 1692, who has been fired from her job at the Salem witch museum and is raising her granddaughter while grieving her daughter's overdose. She goes to a local witch for help. Ruhl wrote it as a rebuttal to The Crucible. Julie Kiernan directs, forty miles from the trials.
Sun Oct 25 · 4:00pm
Cakeswagg's one-act play adapts Sonny's Blues, James Baldwin's 1957 story of a Harlem schoolteacher and his younger brother Sonny, a jazz pianist caught in heroin addiction, and carries it into the twenty-first century to try out alternate endings for Sonny's life. It is the second instalment of the third season of The Heart of Culture Series, presented free by Black History in Action Cambridgeport.
Fri Oct 23 – Sun Oct 25
Fri Oct 23 · 7:30pm / Sat Oct 24 · 7:30pm / Sun Oct 25 · 2pm
Sophie Treadwell's 1928 expressionist play, drawn from the 1927 case of Ruth Snyder, follows a Young Woman pressed into the roles of a society that runs like a machine: stenographer, daughter, wife, mother, lover, murderer, convict and finally condemned woman. Her longing for freedom collides with marriage, motherhood and work. Student Abby McNeil, class of 2028, directs, and Sophie Coté stage-manages.
Sat Oct 24 – Sun Oct 25 · 7pm
Sat Oct 24 / Sun Oct 25 · 7pm
Bill Barclay's play with music, an original adaptation of The Life and Music of Joseph Bologne, Chevalier de Saint-Georges, follows the Black violin virtuoso through his friendships with Mozart and Marie Antoinette and his “widely unrecognized contribution to the abolition of slavery.” Barclay conceived, wrote and directs it. The Chamber Orchestra of Boston opens its season with the piece, in collaboration with Concert Theatre Works and Project STEP.
Tue Oct 27 · 7:30pm
The Moth’s monthly Boston StorySLAM is an open-mic storytelling competition: anyone may put their name in to tell a true five-minute story on the night’s theme. October’s theme is “Frenemies,” about “the razor-thin line between friend and foe” — besties turned competitors, siblings who keep the score. PRX and WBUR are the media sponsors, and seating is first-come, first-served.
Wed Oct 28 – Wed Oct 28 · 5pm & 6:30pm
Wed Oct 28 · 5pm & 6:30pm
An immersive séance in the gaslit parlor of 1920s Salem centres on Mina Crandon, the Boston medium known as “Margery” and billed as “the most famous and polarizing spiritual medium of the Jazz Age.” Scientists, magicians and skeptics gathered at her table while bells rang, ectoplasm materialised and her dead brother Walter's voice spoke from the dark. The audience decides whether it was contact with the dead or deception.
$35
Thu Oct 29 · 7:30pm
The Moth's curated touring Mainstage — five storytellers, true stories told live without notes, on the theme TIGHTROPE — comes to the Wilbur. This is the produced, directed evening, not an open-mic StorySlam: tellers are selected and coached, and the form at its best is as gripping as any play.
from $57
Thu Oct 29 · 6:30pm
An evening of true stories told live, recorded at GBH's Calderwood Studio for the series Stories from the Stage. The theme is the brief meeting that stays with a person for years afterwards. Tellers are selected and directed rather than drawn from the floor, and the audience is part of the recording.
Wed Oct 14 – Sat Oct 31
Lavina Jadhwani retells the Ramayana from Sita's side — the company calls it "part Sanskrit epic, part coming-of-age story, and ultimately a break-up play." Tushar Mathew directs, with movement devised by the ensemble. Jadhwani died in 2025, and this is among the last of her work to reach a stage.
Oct 23–24/29–31
Fri Oct 23 · 8pm, 204 Elm (Somerville) / Sat Oct 24 · 2pm, 204 Elm (Somerville); 8pm, 204 Elm (Somerville) / Thu Oct 29 · 8pm, George Dilboy VFW Post 529 (Somerville) / Fri Oct 30 · 8pm, 204 Elm (Somerville) / Sat Oct 31 · 2pm, 204 Elm (Somerville)
The Post-Meridian Radio Players' 2026 Halloween show is three short plays performed as live radio drama, with Foley artists making the sound effects on stage: Ron N. Butler's adaptation of Lovecraft's Beyond the Wall of Sleep, in which a scientist's dream machine opens onto a realm of monsters; William Cameron's original Phantom Frequency, about a man haunted through his car radio; and W. W. Jacobs's The Monkey's Paw.
Fri Oct 23 – Sat Oct 31
Sarah Ruhl's adaptation of Virginia Woolf's 1928 novel follows Orlando, a young nobleman at the court of Elizabeth I who lives on for more than three centuries, wakes one morning as a woman, and carries on into the twentieth century. Ruhl, a MacArthur Fellow, was twice a Pulitzer finalist, for The Clean House and In the Next Room.
Fri Oct 16 – Sat Oct 31
Agatha Christie's mystery, from her 1939 novel, in which ten guests summoned to an island by an anonymous invitation hear a gramophone record accuse them all of past crimes, then start dying one by one. Dan Sullivan directs and designs the set and costumes; the cast includes Marcia Irwin as Emily Brent, Anthony Rinaldi as Philip Lombard, Melissa Paz as Vera Claythorne and Kevin C. Groppe as Justice Wargrave.
Fri Oct 9 – Sun Nov 1
Jonathan Harker, London's most naive estate agent, runs into Van Helsing, Renfield, Lucy and a Count the production describes as a self-obsessed, pansexual fitness fanatic. Gordon Greenberg and Steve Rosen's spoof is billed as Mel Brooks crossed with Monty Python and a dash of Rocky Horror.
Wed Oct 14 – Sun Nov 1
A respectable doctor invents a second self to do what the first will not admit to wanting, and then cannot call it back. Robert Louis Stevenson published the novella in 1886 and it has been adapted for the stage more or less continuously since; this production opens Merrimack Repertory Theatre's season.
Wed Oct 28 – Sun Nov 1
Patrick Page works through Shakespeare's villains one at a time, arguing that Shakespeare invented the interior life of evil. The solo show won him the Drama Desk, Lucille Lortel and Outer Critics Circle awards off-Broadway. Page was Tony-nominated and won a Grammy for playing Hades in Hadestown.
Sat Oct 31 – Sun Nov 1
When Lisa, a brave young girl with a heart of gold, meets Baba Yaga, the most famous witch in the woods, an epic battle of wits ensues. Recommended for ages 4 - 10. Shadow puppetry.
$18.50 general / $14.50 members, plus $3 fee; $3 Card to Culture
Sun Oct 18 – Tue Nov 3
When his caboose is stranded, a train engineer discovers puppet characters and enchanting musical stories inside a suitcase! Recommended for ages 3 - 7. Hand puppets, live music, and more.
$18.50 general / $14.50 members, plus $3 fee; $3 Card to Culture
Sat Jul 11 – Sat Nov 7
The audience sits as the grand jury at Bridget Bishop's 1692 examination, hears testimony drawn from the surviving court records, questions the witnesses and votes. Bishop was the first person hanged in the Salem witch trials. Mark Stevick wrote it; the run moves from the Armory Visitor Center to Old Town Hall in September.
Thu Oct 8 – Sun Nov 8
Aaron Sorkin's stage adaptation of Harper Lee's novel, in which Atticus Finch's decency is tested rather than simply admired as he defends a wrongfully accused man. Sorkin, who created The West Wing and wrote A Few Good Men, returned to the theatre to write it.
Fri Oct 23 – Sun Nov 8
A one-woman thriller by Weylin Symes, the company's producing artistic director, who co-directs with Daniel Begin. Set in a 19th-century criminal lunatic asylum, it follows Nurse Lucy Cull, eager to prove herself, as she is drawn into radical medical experiments that grow more dangerous. The company likens it to Jekyll and Hyde and Jane Eyre; programmed for Halloween.
Fri Oct 23 – Sun Nov 8
Christin Eve Cato's comedy, in its New England premiere, turns on two Puerto Rican sisters: Caridad is determined to teach Renata the family recipe for sancocho, the traditional beef stew, while Renata only wants her to review their father's will. The New York Times called the play "a meditation on inheritance and family." Luz Lopez and Ines De La Cruz play the sisters, directed by Mariela Lopez-Ponce.
Fri Oct 30 – Sat Nov 14
Michael Frayn's backstage farce, staged by Acme Theater of Weston (directed by David Fisher): a touring company's shambolic production of "Nothing On," seen first from the front and then in mounting chaos from behind the set, where slamming doors, missed cues and flying sardines take over. Weekend performances through mid-November.
Thu Oct 29 – Sun Nov 22
Based on the true story of Katherine Ann Power and Clare Schroeder. In 1970 Power joins an antiwar group whose action turns deadly; she spends decades on the FBI's Most Wanted list while Schroeder grows up in the shadow of her father's murder. They meet when Power resurfaces.
Fri Oct 9 – Sun Nov 22
Lauren Gunderson's two-hander: Caroline, housebound and guarded, and Anthony, athletic and unbothered, argue their way through a Walt Whitman assignment and into ecstatic poetry, mortality and each other. Gunderson has for years been the most-produced living playwright in the United States. Michelle Aguillon directs.
Sat Oct 31 – Sun Nov 22
Kelundra Smith's new play draws on the 1881 Atlanta Washerwomen's Strike, one of the first major labor actions led by Black women in America. Inside a shared laundry co-op, a group of washerwomen organise for fair wages and for respect, turning daily work into collective resistance. Front Porch stages it in the Calderwood's Roberts Studio.
Thu Oct 15 – Sun Nov 22
The latest instalment of the long-running Late Nite Catechism comedy series, in which a lone nun in full habit runs the theatre like a parochial-school classroom and the audience are her pupils. Having covered saints, venial sins and limbo in earlier classes, Sister turns here to the sacraments of Marriage and the Last Rites, with her own version of the Newlywed Game. Audience participation is part of the show.
Sun Nov 1 · 2:00pm
Karin Anell's new dark comedy traps four strangers in a tunnel when a Red Line train stops without warning, and the pressure forces them to confront one another and themselves. Anell, whose TC Squared Theatre stages short plays drawn from real people's life stories, follows the evening performance with a talk-back and panel on technology's changing role in everyday life, which she moderates. Recommended for ages 15 and up.
Sun Nov 1 · 7pm
Janis Brenner created and performs this 51-minute autobiographical solo, a dance-opera-play and comic drama about the ways she “became” her late parents, inheriting her father’s wavy hair and sarcasm and her mother’s singing voice and fragile bones. It won Best Production at the 2018 United Solo Theatre Festival. Brenner, who directs Janis Brenner & Dancers, won a Bessie performing in Meredith Monk’s The Politics of Quiet.
Tue Nov 3 · 7:30pm
An open-mic storytelling competition from The Moth: names are drawn from a hat, and each storyteller gets five minutes, without notes, for a true story on the theme, judged by teams from the audience. The theme is the holiday season, from “the chaos of family gatherings” to “take-out for one,” and what belonging, or not belonging, looks like. Holiday stories from any season are welcome.
$17
Thu Nov 5 – Sun Nov 22
Orthodox Jewish schoolgirls find a banned copy of The Merchant of Venice in a forgotten library and fasten on Jessica, the daughter who runs away. Shaina, most taken of all, has a crush on a Christian boy from her driver's-ed class, and the line between the play and her life begins to blur.
Thu Nov 5 – Sun Nov 15
Shakespeare's comedy of shipwreck and mistaken identity, directed by Steve Dooner. Viola, believing her twin drowned, disguises herself as a man and sets off a chain of misdirected love; below stairs, Sir Toby and Maria run a crueller prank on the steward Malvolio that the last scene never quite settles.
Thu Nov 5 – Sat Nov 7
Lorraine Hansberry's second and last Broadway play, set around a 1960s Greenwich Village political campaign, follows a disillusioned Village intellectual pulled back into commitment against his own better judgement, and takes in ethics, an interracial marriage, drugs and conformity. It opened in 1964 and closed the night Hansberry died. Part of BU's student Fringe Festival.
Fri Nov 6 – Sat Nov 21
Francis Henshall, permanently broke and permanently hungry, takes a job with a small-time London hood who is really his own twin sister in disguise, and a second job with the man who killed her brother. Richard Bean moved Goldoni's Servant of Two Masters to Brighton in 1963.
Fri Nov 6 – Sun Nov 15
The Ephron sisters build a life out of remembered clothes — the prom dress, the wedding dress, the bag that outlasted a marriage — in a piece written for a rotating cast who read it from stools rather than act it out.
Fri Nov 6 – Sat Nov 21
Five siblings gather at their father's deathbed, and the wake turns into storytelling and then into something stranger, as Sarah Ruhl lets the play slip out of the hospital room and into Neverland. Ruhl wrote it for her mother, who played Peter Pan as a young woman.
Fri Nov 6 – Sat Nov 21
Lucas Hnath sets the young Isaac Newton against Robert Hooke in an argument about optics, ambition and whose name ends up on the discovery. Hnath writes it deliberately out of period, with a narrator stopping to mark which parts of it are true.
Fri Nov 6 – Sat Nov 14
Rob Urbinati crosses Noel Coward with Agatha Christie: a bickering playwright and his actress wife, a country house, an assortment of weekend guests, a corpse, and a chauffeur who may be the detective. Urbinati is a New York director and dramatist whose plays are widely produced by community theatres.
Fri Nov 6 – Sun Nov 15
Summer 1947. Joe Keller is a self-made manufacturer and a pillar of his neighbourhood, and his younger son Larry has been missing since the war. When the older son announces he means to marry Larry's sweetheart, buried truths surface. Miller took the plot from a real wartime case.
Fri Nov 6 · 8:00pm
What if a fuzzy hand puppet could make you face your own humanity and reconcile with a tragic and horrific past? Plus, a splash of Broadway and jazz standards! Recommended for ages 16+. Hand puppets.
Sat Nov 7 · 10:30am
A puppet show all about making art, following your dreams, and not letting people tell you “no.” Recommended for ages 5 - 9. Hand puppets.
Tue Nov 10 · 7:00pm
A National Theatre Live broadcast of Clifford Odets's Golden Boy: in Depression-era New York a gifted young violinist is lured from music into professional boxing, and must weigh what he will sacrifice for fame and fortune. Josh O'Connor leads, screened at the Coolidge.
Wed Nov 11 · 7:00pm
A Veterans Day edition of Fish Tales, the Gloucester Writers Center's storytelling showcase in the manner of The Moth, in which local people tell true stories on a set theme. The series began in 2013; a volunteer storyteller-in-residence recruits and coaches each cast with the centre's staff, and ticket proceeds help fund its free and low-cost readings, workshops and open mics.
Wed Nov 11 – Sun Nov 15
Bats! Fish! Salamanders! Caves are awesome and full of cool creatures and beautiful rocks. And best of all, caves never change — at least that’s what Jamie thinks. Be among the first to see this world premiere from CactusHead Puppets — known for their delightful shows of mixed puppetry styles, like Magnificent Monster Circus and The Bremen Town Musicians! Recommended for ages 5 - 9. Tabletop and shadow puppetry.
$18.50 general / $14.50 members, plus $3 fee; $3 Card to Culture
Thu Nov 12 – Fri Nov 13
An immersive occult evening built on the idea of secrets shared "sub rosa" — under the rose. Guests lounge Roman-style on velvet couches, chat with mysterious characters, are blessed by a Priestess and share confessions under anonymity, with wandering musicians and paired wines to loosen tongues. You decide how deep to go.
Thu Nov 12 – Sun Nov 22
Orthodox Jewish schoolgirls meeting in a forgotten library find a banned copy of The Merchant of Venice and fix on Jessica, Shylock's runaway daughter. Shaina, the most discontented of them, wants the world outside her community and begins to read her own restlessness into the part. A new play in Boston Playwrights' 2026-27 season.
Thu Nov 12 – Sun Nov 22
In the words of Norton Award–winning Theater UnCorked: “Set in rural Ireland, this riveting Drama Desk and Tony Award winning dark comedy centers around a manipulative mother and her spinster daughter who are trapped in a cycle of dependence and fear that will not only leave audiences laughing but also gasping in horror.” The New York Times’s Ben Brantley called it “a gasp for breath inside an airless life.”
Thu Nov 12 – Sat Nov 21
Sarah Ruhl retells the Orpheus myth from his wife's side: Eurydice arrives in an underworld where she meets her dead father, who teaches her language again, and must choose between him and the husband climbing down to fetch her. Ruhl wrote it after her own father's death. Carrie Ann Quinn directs the UMass Boston production.
$18 general / $13 UMass Boston students, faculty & staff
Fri Nov 13 – Thu Dec 31
The Cornley University Drama Society attempts J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, and the flying rig, the set, a love triangle and Captain Hook's meltdown all work against them. Mischief Theatre's slapstick is engineered with far more precision than the incompetence it depicts.
Fri Nov 13 – Sun Nov 15
Fri Nov 13 · 7:30pm / Sat Nov 14 · 7:30pm / Sun Nov 15 · 2pm
Performed in French with English captions overhead. On a rainy night in the Ardennes, Martin Martin buries his father and finds a handwritten notebook that sends him chasing across centuries and continents. Alexis Michalik, who wrote it, has won several Molière awards, and built the piece for a small cast playing many parts. It runs an hour and forty minutes, for ages ten and up.
Fri Nov 13 – Sun Nov 15
Chekhov's last play, written in 1903: an aristocratic Russian family comes back to the estate it can no longer afford, for one visit before the orchard is sold and cut down. Chekhov called it a comedy and Stanislavski staged it as a tragedy, and the argument has never been settled. The student Off-Broadway Players produce; Tom Coiner directs.
Sat Nov 14 – Sun Nov 22
Nine short plays by New England writers, each on what it takes to perform in ordinary life, staged by several different directors. The Belmont Dramatic Club was founded in 1903, and says this is the first festival of original short works in its history.
Sat Nov 14 · 8:00pm
Join us for an evening of short-form puppetry for adults, featuring a range of puppetry styles and a guaranteed good time. Recommended for adults and teens 16+. Mixed puppetry styles.
Wed Nov 18 – Sat Nov 21
Five people take a six-week acting class at a Vermont community centre, and Annie Baker lets the exercises and the silences between them do the work until the small betrayals become visible. Emerson Stage is the college's student-led production company.
Thu Nov 19 – Sun Nov 22
An electro-acoustic vocal piece from The HawtPlates, a two-time Grammy-winning family band, built around whether we can remember our own dreams and share the ones we hold in common. A review the company quotes calls it comfort found in sharing your most disorienting dreams.
Thu Nov 19 · 6:30pm
GBH WORLD records another Stories from the Stage evening at its Brighton studio, this one on the occasions when laughter is the only reasonable response left. The tellers are ordinary people whose stories have been selected and shaped for the broadcast rather than stand-up comedians working material.
Thu Nov 19 · 7:30pm
Phoebe Judge, host of the podcast Criminal, which tells stories about people “who’ve done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in the middle,” turns the format on herself in a new stage show. She tells stories about her own eccentric, unpredictable family in Chicago, the secrets she discovered growing up, and how they shaped her work as a journalist and true-crime host.
Fri Nov 20 – Sun Nov 29
Nick tells his four Italian-American grandparents that a promotion is taking him to Seattle, and they set about stopping him with food and an eligible young woman. Joe DiPietro's comedy ran off-Broadway for more than two years from 1998, and has been a staple of regional and community seasons since.
Fri Nov 20 – Sun Dec 6
Kaela Mei-Shing Garvin's play rewrites Our Town into a small town south of San Francisco in this century, keeping Wilder's George and Emily and their friends but letting them shed the selves they have outgrown — a high-school sweetheart, a gender assigned at birth. Garvin directs her own script, which the department is staging over three weekends.
Sat Nov 21 – Sun Nov 22
Quiara Alegría Hudes's play, which won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Drama, sets an Iraq veteran's struggle to find a place at home against an online chat room where recovering addicts, his mother among them, keep each other going day by day.
Sat Nov 21 – Sun Nov 22
A baby bird goes on a voyage of growth, flight, and the changing seasons in this heartwarming story in English, Spanish, French, and Russian! Recommended for ages 1 - 6. Hand puppetry and live music.
Tue Nov 24 – Sun Dec 13
In the marshes of South Carolina, Clora Abernathy opens her door to Adiaha Ufot, a stranger from Massachusetts. Both have given their lives to their parents, and what stirs between them raises the question of what might happen if they were good to themselves instead. It closes Mfoniso Udofia's nine-play Ufot Family Cycle.
Tue Nov 24 · 7:00pm
The seventh annual edition of this storytelling night presents true stories by adult storytellers on identity, origin, separation and reunion, drawn from adoption, foster care, donor conception and unexpected family discoveries. It was created by Lisa “LC” Coppola, a DCF adoptee and author of Voices Unheard: A Reflective Journal for Adult Adoptees, whose debut novel Monster Flower is forthcoming. Kristal Parke, a filmmaker and transracial adoptee, also appears.
Wed Nov 25 – Sun Dec 13
All six Austen novels compressed into a single fast and deliberately unhinged evening, written by Jessica Bedford, Kathryn MacMillan, Charlotte Northeast and Meghan Winch. Actors' Shakespeare Project programmes it alongside its own Dracula comedy this autumn. Austen finished six novels; two were published after her death.
Fri Nov 27 – Sun Dec 20
Joe Landry stages the Capra film as a 1940s radio broadcast: a small cast at microphones playing every part, with a foley table supplying the snow, the doors and the ice. The audience watches the sound being made as much as the story.
Fri Nov 27 – Sun Nov 29
The classic story of a young woman whose good heart transports her from rags to royalty, with a few unexpected twists! Recommended for ages 4 – 8. Marionettes.
Fri Nov 27 – Sun Jan 3
A holiday spin-off from the author of the Late Nite Catechism series, in which Sister, the parochial-school nun who treats the audience as her class, investigates a question she frames as a historical mystery: what became of the gold the Magi brought to Bethlehem? Along the way she retells the nativity story, casting audience members in her own living Nativity scene, from the Virgin Mary to the donkey.
Sat Nov 28 · 2:00pm
Blanche, Dorothy, Rose and Sophia return, played in drag and rather less filtered than television allowed, with cheesecake involved. This is a scripted touring parody rather than an improvised drag show. The Golden Girls ran for seven seasons from 1985.
Mon Nov 30 · 7:00pm
A double bill of solo clown and bouffon shows. In TRAD, written and performed by Hannah Mitchell and directed by Iris McCloughan, a pregnant trad wife's faith in her homestead idyll is tested; Broad Street Review called Mitchell's performance “laugh-out-loud funny.” In DENTATA, Julia VanderVeen plays Beth Anne, a middle-aged near-beauty queen who looks for herself in Medusa, the Sirens and Macbeth's Weird Sisters; Jess Lazar directs.
Wed Dec 2 – Sat Dec 5
Olga, Masha and Irina keep saying they will go to Moscow and keep not going, while the provincial garrison town closes in around them. Paul Schmidt's translation is among the most speakable in English. Emerson Stage is the college's student-led production company.
Wed Dec 2 – Sun Dec 6
Kurt Vonnegut's 1970 comedy recasts the Odyssey. Penelope Ryan's husband Harold, a legendary soldier and millionaire, has been missing in the jungle for eight years; her son insists he will return, a hippie doctor and a vacuum-cleaner salesman compete for her, and the ghosts of Harold's past, little Wanda June among them, keep interrupting. Then Harold walks in on his birthday.
Wed Dec 2 · 7:30pm
The Moth StorySLAM is an open-mic storytelling competition: names are drawn from a hat, and each storyteller has five minutes, without notes, to tell a true story, scored by teams of judges from the audience. This one throws out the theme, so any story is fair game, including one that never fit a past Moth theme or comes from “the archived memories.” WBUR is The Moth’s media partner.
$17
Thu Dec 3 – Sun Dec 27
All six Austen novels compressed into a single fast and deliberately unhinged evening, written by Jessica Bedford, Kathryn MacMillan, Charlotte Northeast and Meghan Winch. Actors' Shakespeare Project programmes it alongside its own Dracula comedy this autumn. Austen finished six novels; two were published after her death.
Thu Dec 3 – Sun Dec 6
A bride stands at the threshold of a life already chosen for her, and longing has its own momentum. Old rivalries resurface, the celebration turns dark, and Lorca's tragedy unfolds like a poem set alight. Langston Hughes made this translation, which puts two poets on the same page.
Thu Dec 3 – Sun Dec 6
Jiehae Park's Macbeth transposed to the college admissions season: Asian-American twins M and L have arranged their whole lives around a place at The College, there is one spot, and the person holding it becomes a problem to be solved. The witches turn up as a classmate called Dirty Girl.
Thu Dec 3 – Sun Dec 6
Annie Baker's play watches five people through six weeks of a community-centre acting class in Vermont, where the exercises keep turning into confessions and the pauses do most of the work. It won an Obie for Best New American Play.
Fri Dec 4 – Sun Dec 13
Two women are assigned the same room in an assisted-living facility and escalate from passive aggression to outright sabotage. David Lindsay-Abaire, who won the Pulitzer for Rabbit Hole, writes it as a war of attrition between people who cannot simply leave.
Fri Dec 4 – Sun Dec 20
Langston Hughes's gospel song cycle retells the Nativity through the African American experience in gospel music, dance, African drumming and spoken word. This is the National Center of Afro-American Artists' 56th season of the piece, which it bills as the world's longest-running production; Desiree A. Springer directs, keeping the staging legacy of founder Elma Lewis and the music arrangements of John Andrew Ross.
Sat Dec 5 – Sun Dec 6
The classic story of a little running cookie — with an interactive, Christmas twist. Recommended for ages 3 - 6. Hand puppets.
Sun Dec 6 · 5pm
The touring stage version of the 1965 Peanuts television special comes to Lynn for one December afternoon: Charlie Brown's search for the real meaning of Christmas, played out with the Vince Guaraldi songs and the whole gang, for audiences of all ages.
Thu Dec 10 – Sun Dec 20
Dickens published the novella in 1843 and it is often credited with fixing the shape of the modern holiday: Ebenezer Scrooge, three spirits and one night in industrial London, told as a ghost story and a piece of social argument at the same time. Mass Arts Center plays evenings at 7:30pm with weekend matinees.
Thu Dec 10 · 6:30pm
The December edition of Stories from the Stage takes the holidays that go wrong and the people who turn up anyway. GBH WORLD records the series before a studio audience at Calderwood Studio; the tellers are members of the public whose stories have been selected and directed for broadcast.
Fri Dec 11 – Sun Dec 20
Commonwealth Shakespeare's Victorian staging of Dickens, with the Boston actor Will Lyman among the cast. The company returns to it each December on a larger scale than its free summer Shakespeare on the Common allows. Dickens wrote the novella in six weeks.
Fri Dec 11 – Sun Dec 13
It's a Hanukkah emergency! When a fuzzy troll steals the Rabbi's menorah, it's up to the most unlikely person to get it back. All ages welcome, recommended for ages 3 - 8. Hand Puppetry.
Fri Dec 11 – Sun Dec 20
Kendall Grenolds’s dark comedy follows the co-hosts of a hit true-crime podcast that “packages murder as quirky, relatable content for the girlies,” as the line between ambition and exploitation blurs. The play examines the American obsession with violence, the commodification of trauma and who has the right to tell a story. Emma DeWitt directs this first full production, following a Boston workshop premiere; Grenolds is a Chicago playwright.
Tue Dec 15 – Wed Dec 23
A new, non-verbal Blue Man Group show built around the holidays, in which the three Blue Men work through the season's traditions and rituals and play holiday music on the company's custom-built instruments. Blue Man Group ran resident in Boston at the Charles Playhouse for more than twenty-five years before closing there.
From $35
Mon Dec 21 – Sun Jan 3
Cole Escola imagines Mary Todd Lincoln as a restless, cabaret-obsessed misfit stuck in the White House while her husband is otherwise occupied. Escola won a Tony for the play, which ran on Broadway and in the West End before this tour.
Sun Dec 27 – Wed Dec 30
While lost in the woods, Hansel and Gretel must overcome many challenges — including a troll, a witch, and the temptation of a candy-covered house! Recommended for ages 4 – 9. Marionettes.
Fri Jan 1 – Sun Jan 3
Princesses can be named after vegetables and witches can have good intentions, in this charming rendition of a classic story. Recommended for ages 4 - 8. Glove puppets.
$18.50 general / $14.50 members, plus $3 fee; $3 Card to Culture
Fri Jan 15 – Sat Jan 30
A routine council meeting in the town of Big Cherry turns into something else when a new member starts asking what happened at the meeting before. Tracy Letts's comedy is about the story a community tells about itself, and how far it will go to defend that version.
Fri Jan 15 – Sun Jan 17
Barbed Wire, a new play by Japanese American playwright Rosanna Yamagiwa Alfaro and African American playwright Mary E. McCullough, follows Sam, a young Japanese American held in a World War II internment camp, and his friendship with Johnny, a Black soldier stationed there, from internment into his early college years. Drawn from Alfaro's family experience, it is the Center's annual MLK weekend production and its first full staging.
Fri Jan 15 – Sun Jan 17
Performed in French with English captions overhead. An actress who dreamed of the classics and of being chosen by great directors accepts a job she never imagined: playing a mascot in supermarkets. Anne Jeanvoine wrote this solo with Anne Rehbinder from her own life, and it follows her from hiding inside a costume to coming out as a gay woman.
Sat Jan 16 – Sun Jan 24
A woman waits out a tornado warning in her basement and talks — about insurance, luck, gambling and Hamlet — until it becomes clear what she is really sheltering from. Lauren Gunderson wrote it as a monologue and released it for benefit readings on gun violence.
Thu Jan 21 – Sun Feb 7
Emma Rice stages the Hitchcock chase, in which the advertising man Roger Thornhill is mistaken for a Cold War spy and pursued across America by crop duster and up Mount Rushmore. The Times of London called the production "glorious". The Daily Mail called it effortlessly chic.
Wed Jan 27 – Sat Jan 30
A screwball comedy about a divorced couple whose carefully orchestrated double date leaves the ex-wife juggling her ex-husband's feelings, a disastrous date and her own secret romance. J.W. Andrew, an Emerson MFA student, won the Rod Parker Playwriting Fellowship with it; the award, funded by the family of the television writer Rod Parker '51, brings a lab production and a cash prize. Joe Antoun directs.
Thu Jan 28 – Sun Feb 21
Shakespeare's longest play, and the one in which the revenge keeps being postponed by the thinking. Actors' Shakespeare Project takes it on in midwinter; the company's habit is to play Shakespeare in found rooms rather than from a permanent house.
Fri Jan 29 – Sat Feb 20
On the outskirts of a small Idaho town, an aunt and a nephew who barely know one another end up sharing a house after a sudden death. Samuel D. Hunter writes about people who stay put. The play was nominated for the 2026 Tony for Best Play.
Fri Jan 29 – Sun Feb 7
Jane Austen's 1813 novel on stage. Elizabeth Bennet, the second of five daughters in a family whose estate will pass to a cousin, and the proud, wealthy Mr Darcy misjudge each other across a round of country balls, a disastrous first proposal, the charming Mr Wickham's lies and Lydia Bennet's elopement, before either will admit to having been wrong.
Fri Jan 29 – Sun Feb 14
Molière's last play, and the one he was performing when he collapsed on stage: a hypochondriac appalled in equal measure by his imagined illnesses and his real medical bills decides to marry his daughter to a doctor and secure free treatment for life. The maid takes the scheme apart, and the doctors with it.
Sat Jan 30 – Sun Feb 7
Wendy Kesselman's adaptation of the Goodrich and Hackett play restores material cut from the 1955 original, and follows the eight people hidden in the Amsterdam annexe through the fear, the boredom and the arguments of two years in four rooms.
Thu Feb 4 – Sun Feb 28
Derbyshire, 1809: the thirteen-year-old Lady Thomasina Coverly proposes a scientific theory whose implications she cannot yet grasp, while her tutor conducts several affairs. Stoppard runs 1809 and the present day in the same room, and lets the modern scholars get almost everything wrong.
Fri Feb 5 – Sun Feb 28
The fading Hollywood star Marina Gregg arrives in a sleepy English village to make a film, and at the reception in her honour a local woman — her self-described biggest fan — dies from a poisoned cocktail. Miss Marple is on hand. A new adaptation of Christie's novel.
Sat Feb 6 – Sun Feb 14
The Younger family in 1950s Chicago receive an insurance cheque after the father's death, and each of them has a different idea of what it is for. Lorraine Hansberry was twenty-nine, and the first Black woman to have a play produced on Broadway.
Thu Feb 11 – Sun Feb 14
An Irish wake staged as a celebration rather than a solemnity, mixing traditional custom with club anthems, aerial work, Irish tap, cabaret, slam poetry and pole-dancing. The company frames the wake as a rite of transformation, moving from one realm to the next.
Thu Feb 11 · 7:30pm
Richard Thomas plays Twain in the one-man show Hal Holbrook wrote and performed for decades, and is the first actor authorized to take on the role since. An Emmy winner and 2025 Theater Hall of Fame inductee long known as John-Boy Walton, Thomas was recently on Broadway in Our Town and in The Balusters, which brought him a 2026 Tony nomination. The 90-minute show contains racially explicit language.
Fri Feb 12 – Sat Feb 27
Ken Ludwig's adaptation of Christie's best-known puzzle: a train stopped by a snowdrift, a dead passenger, and a carriage of suspects who all have alibis. Poirot's difficulty turns out to be not too few solutions but too many. Christie based the snowbound setting on a real stranding of the train.
Sat Feb 13 – Sun Mar 7
Lily and her family move to care for her ailing Korean grandmother, and Lily strikes a bargain with a tiger out of her grandmother's stories. Katie Hae Leo adapted Tae Keller's novel and Michelle M. Aguillon directs. Eighty minutes, recommended for ages six and up.
Thu Feb 18 – Sun Mar 21
Talene Monahon's play moves between an Armenian man fighting for legal recognition in the American courts in the 1920s and a generation a century later chasing influence and fame. Part historical drama and part satire, it was a hit in its New York premiere.
Thu Feb 18 – Sun Mar 7
On 4 July 2027 in Roswell, New Mexico, Lauryn — government operative, veteran, nearly an astronaut — has spent a decade trying to bring aliens back. With a marginalised physicist, Dr. Hart, she finds a human medium whose body can hold what arrives. A new play in Boston Playwrights' 2026-27 season.
Fri Feb 19 – Sat Mar 6
Sarah Bernhardt and Eleonora Duse were the two most celebrated actresses of their age, and rivals throughout it. Lillian Groag imagines them in the same city rehearsing the same role, while their managements work to keep them apart and the press waits.
Fri Feb 19 – Sat Mar 6
Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's rewriting of the fifteenth-century morality play Everyman, in which the actor who plays Everybody is drawn by lottery at each performance and the rest of the cast reshuffles into whatever parts are left. Death comes for Everybody, who then tries to persuade Friendship, Kinship and the others to come along. It was a Pulitzer finalist in 2018.
Fri Feb 19 – Sat Feb 27
Heidi Schreck's play, a finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize, restages the American Legion debate contests she entered as a teenager to pay for college and follows the document's reach into the lives of four generations of women in her family. It closes with a live debate over whether the Constitution should be abolished. Demetra Tseckares directs the production, which is a fundraiser for Hovey.
Sat Feb 20 – Sun Feb 21
MJ Kaufman's play follows the Men's Peer Education group at Watson College, who believe self-awareness will end campus sexual violence, until a rumour reaches them. The cast is women and gender-nonconforming actors, double-cast as both the men and the women.
Wed Feb 24 – Sun Mar 14
The Reduced Shakespeare Company's three-actor sprint through the Western canon, Homer to Hemingway, compressed into about two hours. The company built the format with The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) in 1987 and has since applied it to the Bible, American history and sport.
Thu Feb 25 – Sun Feb 28
A live performance in which an audience member takes the role of Brian, an unhoused veteran reliving his final weeks inside a looping digital hospital of corridors and bureaucratic dead ends. Theatre and video-game logic converge on what machine memory keeps and what it discards.
Thu Feb 25 – Sun Mar 7
Rebecca turns up unannounced at her twin sister Ruth's house, a visit that has nothing at all to do with Ruth having just come home from hospital after a suicide attempt. Ruth is living with an eccentric stranger she met on the psychiatric ward. A new play in Boston Playwrights' 2026-27 season.
Thu Feb 25 – Sat Feb 27
David Adjmi's play takes the queen from her arrival at Versailles as a teenage bride to her fall, written in deliberately modern language and staged with modern design. Adjmi treats her as a celebrity under permanent scrutiny rather than a historical figure, and the script is darkly comic about the gap between the court's rituals and the country outside them.
Fri Feb 26 – Sun Mar 14
A lexicographer at a dictionary publisher is caught on video using a slur, and the office has to decide what the word now means and whether to keep printing it. Jacqueline Bircher's comedy takes place over the day that follows.
Thu Mar 4 – Sun Mar 7
Chela De Ferrari's Peruvian company plays Hamlet with eight actors who have Down syndrome, weaving their own lives through Shakespeare's text with pop music and pointed humour. The play's questions about who is granted a full inner life land differently as a result.
Fri Mar 5 – Sun Mar 21
Shakespeare's last solo play, with Prospera rather than Prospero at its centre — the deposed ruler as mother, which shifts the weight of the forgiveness at the end. The magic, the shipwreck and Caliban's claim on the island are unchanged.
Fri Mar 5 – Sun Mar 14
Carey Crim writes about marriages coming apart while the people inside them are doing something entirely ordinary. Here it is a suburban paint-and-sip class, where the small talk keeps giving way to things nobody meant to say. Corey Cadigan directs.
Sat Mar 6 – Sun Mar 21
Ada Lovelace sees that Charles Babbage's calculating engine could work on more than numbers, and describes something like computing a century before it arrives. Lauren Gunderson writes her as a poet's daughter — Byron's — who chose mathematics instead. She died at thirty-six.
Wed Mar 10 – Sun Mar 14
The Scottish mentalist Scott Silven builds an evening out of memory, suggestion and a good deal of storytelling, closer to a seance than a card trick. The New York Times made it a Critic's Pick and Vogue called him a world-renowned mentalist.
Fri Mar 12 – Sat Mar 27
MT Cozzola's whodunit gathers six ambitious women at a secluded mountain retreat to write their masterpieces, until one of them meets a mysterious end and the manuscripts give way to alibis. As a relentless inspector digs for the truth, each writer shields her own secrets and has to face her deepest desires and the ties of love, art and community that bind the group. Mary Ellen Macri directs.
Fri Mar 12 – Sun Mar 14
Sandy Rustin's stage comedy, adapted from the 1985 Paramount film and the Hasbro board game, gathers six blackmailed guests at Boddy Manor for a dinner that turns to murder, as Mrs. Peacock, Colonel Mustard and the rest race through the house trying to catch the killer before the body count rises. This is a touring production; the page names no cast or director.
Fri Mar 19 – Sun Apr 11
It is 2003 and LeBron James is coming to Cleveland, but superfan Matt has to sell his season tickets after a business venture fails. Shawn buys them, and Rajiv Joseph follows the two men's friendship across the length of a basketball career.
Fri Mar 19 – Sat Mar 27
Tony Kushner's two-part epic of Reagan-era New York, Roy Cohn, the AIDS crisis and an angel crashing through a ceiling, staged here in full. Both parts run around seven hours together. Emerson Stage is the college's student-led production company. Kushner subtitled it A Gay Fantasia on National Themes.
Fri Mar 19 · 8:00pm
Vladimir Gurkin's comedy, which Vladimir Menshov filmed in 1984, follows Vasily, a village worker sent to a southern resort after an injury, who falls for a woman he meets there and leaves his wife Nadya and their children before finding his way home. Coast To Coast Entertainment's production is performed in Russian, with Vasily Mishchenko, Mikhail Khmurov, Lera Kudryavtseva, Galina Danilova and Elena Borzova in the cast.
Thu Apr 1 – Sun Apr 11
A dying white Afrikaner actor preparing to play Lear is assigned a Black nurse, and post-apartheid South Africa argues itself out between them. John Kani wrote it and has performed it himself; the Royal Shakespeare Company premiered it in 2019.
Wed Apr 7 – Sun Apr 25
Paul Tsongas ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1992 out of Lowell, on fiscal discipline and an argument nobody else in the field was making, and won the New Hampshire primary without ever leading the race. Merrimack Rep commissioned the play and gives it its world premiere in the city Tsongas came from.
Thu Apr 8 – Sun Apr 11
Lillian Hellman's 1941 play brings a German anti-fascist organiser, his American wife and their three children out of Europe into her mother's comfortable house outside Washington, where a Romanian houseguest recognises him and the war they fled arrives with him. It won the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award over Blithe Spirit.
Fri Apr 9 – Sun May 2
A gypsy-cab station in 1970s Pittsburgh faces demolition, and the drivers who work out of it face what comes next. Jitney is the earliest-set play in August Wilson's ten-play Century Cycle, and the first he wrote of them. Wilson set each play of the cycle in a different decade of the twentieth century.
Fri Apr 9 – Sun Apr 25
Ken Ludwig's adaptation of Christie's best-known puzzle: a train stopped by a snowdrift, a dead passenger, and a carriage of suspects who all have alibis. Poirot's difficulty turns out to be not too few solutions but too many. Christie based the snowbound setting on a real stranding of the train.
Sat Apr 10 – Sun Apr 18
A free adaptation of Defoe's novel that opens on the night before Moll's hanging at Newgate, as she tells her life — marriages, escapes and a career of London theft — to the minister sent to save her soul, and changes him in the telling.
Wed Apr 14 – Sat May 8
Alex Lin's caustic reworking of King Lear in a Chinatown restaurant: when a high-rise developer moves to buy her out, A-Poh summons three grandchildren home to plan a defence, while her own memory goes. Michael Hisamoto directs the New England premiere, dedicated to Wai Ching Ho.
Fri Apr 16 – Sun Apr 25
Four college friends meet for eighteen holes twenty years after graduation, and the round becomes an audit of what each of them has and has not become. Norm Foster is the most-produced playwright in Canada; the play unfolds in real time across a single game.
Sat Apr 17 – Sat May 15
A stage version of Thelma Lynne Godin's picture book, set on a Harlem block: ten-year-old Kameeka is fixed on winning the neighbourhood hula-hooping contest, and the day keeps handing her reasons to look after other people first. Wheelock Family Theatre closes its season with it, playing to school groups as well as public audiences.
Thu Apr 22 – Sun May 2
Four sets of guests occupy the same Beverly Hills hotel suite in turn, and Neil Simon writes each as a separate short play — a divorce negotiation, an Oscar night, a visiting couple, and two families on holiday together. Simon wrote it as a companion to his earlier Plaza Suite.
Fri Apr 30 – Sun May 23
Paula Vogel's play about the company that staged Sholem Asch's God of Vengeance on Broadway in 1923 — the first play there to show two women kissing — and were prosecuted for obscenity. Ilyse Robbins directs, with klezmer music and dance running through it.
Fri Apr 30 – Sat May 15
Lisa D'Amour's play, a finalist for the 2011 Pulitzer Prize, is set in a first-ring suburb outside "a city that might be Detroit," where Ben and Mary invite the couple who have just moved into the deserted house next door, Sharon and Kenny, over for a barbecue. The newcomers met at rehab, neither has a job, and they own no furniture. J. Mark Baumhardt directs.
Fri May 7 – Sat May 29
Deborah Zoe Laufer and Daniel Green's music-filled comedy, a world premiere, drops Shakespeare's best-known young heroines into a magically glitched storyline. Done with dying, marrying and “generally behaving,” they start questioning whom they love, who they are and why their stories always end the same way. M. Bevin O'Gara directs the production that closes SpeakEasy's 36th season.
Fri May 7 – Sat May 22
Kate Hamill's adaptation of Austen plays the marriage plot fast and broad, with heavy doubling, slapstick and a cast that never leaves the stage. Hamill wrote it for herself as Elizabeth Bennet, and it has become one of the most produced plays in the United States. Burlington Players close their season with it.
Fri May 7 – Sun May 23
Donald Margulies's play gathers a family of actors at their Berkshires summer house during the Williamstown Theatre Festival, a year after the death of the daughter who held them together. A weekend goes wrong, and the jealousies they perform professionally get turned on each other. Margulies won the Pulitzer for Dinner with Friends.
Fri May 7 – Sun May 9
Performed in French with English captions overhead. A year after Guy de Maupassant's death, Paris's literary society holds a benefit to pay for his statue in the Parc Monceau, and the actress Madame Pasca is to perform four of his stories. Then an unknown actor, Octave Lacombe, turns up to audition on Émile Zola's recommendation. Sylvie Blotnikas adapted the stories.
Fri May 14 – Sat May 29
A couple in their seventies calmly announce their divorce after fifty years, and their grown sons take it a great deal harder than they do. Bess Wohl writes the parents as people with interior lives their children never troubled to imagine.
Fri May 14 – Sun Jun 6
A successful Haitian-American lawyer confronts the truth that she does not want children, and the decision forces a reckoning with her mother, her heritage and “the life she has built in pursuit of everyone else’s dreams.” Phanésia Pharel's new play moves between present-day America and remembered Haiti. Pascale Florestal, Front Porch's associate artistic director, directs the production, which closes the company's tenth-anniversary season.
Thu Jun 3 – Sun Jun 27
Two men each invent a fictitious person to escape their obligations, and both are undone by the name Ernest. Eric Tucker of Bedlam stages Wilde with three actors covering every part, which puts the machinery of Victorian respectability on show.
Sat Jun 5 – Sun Jun 13
Joseph Robinette's stage version of E.B. White's novel, written with White's own advice: Wilbur the pig, Fern who can hear the animals talking, Templeton the rat who does nothing for free, and the barn spider who writes in her web to keep Wilbur off the butcher's table. Theatre III closes its season with it.
Fri Jul 23 – Sat Aug 7
Stoppard's play about a playwright writing about infidelity while conducting one, opening with a scene that turns out to be from a play within the play. It is the closest he came to writing directly about love. It won the 1984 Tony for Best Play.
dates TBA
A Haitian-American family in Boston takes in an exchange student from Haiti, and his arrival makes them reckon with what their own American life has cost them. Kimstelle Merisma's play gets a workshop and a public staged reading under Fresh Ink's Ink Spot Residency.
dates TBA
Skeeter's psychological condition means she experiences life through delusion and can never be sure what is real — including whether Kate is still her friend. H. Avery's two-hander gets two internal workshops and a public staged reading in Fresh Ink's development residency.
dates TBA
Lucy Prebble's play about the accounting fraud that brought down the energy company, which stages mark-to-market bookkeeping and the shell partnerships that hid the debt as things you can watch happen. It ran at the Royal Court and in the West End before a short, unhappy Broadway transfer. Hannah Baker directs for Theatre@First.
dates TBA
Lawrence Gullo’s comedy follows Elle, a young photographer in 1930s London who falls in with a circle of queer and trans friends, among them an aristocrat whose inheritance is at stake, an anarchist stuck on his manifesto and a flapper who wears her own designs. Pansy Rampant Productions premiered it in Cambridge in 2024; Addie Pates directs this production.
dates TBA
Shakespeare's comedy of two courtships: Beatrice and Benedick insulting each other into an engagement, and Claudio and Hero nearly destroyed by a slander staged to look like proof. Paula Hawthorne directs for Theatre@First, which programmes a Shakespeare in its summer slot each year and plays it in and around First Church Somerville.
dates TBA
Robert Lawson’s reworking of Moby Dick is, in its publisher’s words, “more a poetic fantasia than literal adaptation”: with songs, contemporary humour and a weaving of other myths, a crew of whalers sets off on an epic hunt before the obsessed Captain Ahab steers them onto an entirely different course. Jess Viator and Alex Gorowara direct.
dates TBA
Nora and Delia Ephron's play, adapted from Ilene Beckerman's book, is a set of monologues and ensemble pieces in which women recall their lives through what they were wearing — mothers, prom dresses, the first bra, handbags they hated, and the reason the wardrobe ends up entirely black. Five actors play every part.
dates TBA
MIT's autumn production, directed by Josh Higgason, sets the Old English epic inside a surreal corporate office, where a junior bureaucrat's working day becomes the poem and the monsters arrive through it. Students devise the piece with the theatre faculty over the term rather than working from a fixed script.
dates TBA
History Alive's annual programme of New England winter customs from the period before Christmas was a public holiday at all, rewritten every year around a different theme. The 2026 edition takes the overlap between abolitionism and Christmas in the nineteenth century. The company works in costume in Salem, in historic rooms rather than a theatre.
